How Christophe Perrin is Revolutionising Experimentation at ABsmartly

Experimentation has the power to transform how companies make decisions. Christophe Perrin knows this better than most. From his early days at Optimizely, to his influential role at Booking.com, and now as Head of Product at ABsmartly, Chris’ career has been defined by an enthusiasm for data, innovation, and empowering teams to experiment. With his knack for making the complex accessible, he’s on a mission to make experimentation the cornerstone of great product development.

From Theory to Practice at Optimizely

In 2013, Chris took his first real steps into experimentation at Optimizely, a company that was just beginning to expand outside the United States. Joining their EMEA office in Amsterdam, Chris’ role at Optimizely was mostly a technical one, providing support and training to help get customers started with experimentation.

Back then, A/B testing was not as mainstream as it is today, it was still quite an unfamiliar concept for many. Use cases for A/B testing were very similar to the ones which led Dan Siroker to create Optimizely in the first place (a bit of A/B testing history), focused on small UI tweaks like changing images, button colors, copy, or testing alternate headlines. A/B testing tools were pretty much exclusively targeted at marketing and CRO teams and the single most important capability of an A/B testing platform in those days was the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and its ability to create experiments and make changes to the website without the need for a developer. 

While groundbreaking for non-technical teams, this could create quite a bit of tension with development teams as changes to the website were made without going through a formal product development process, creating cumbersome code that would inevitably introduce bugs, slow down the website and create the dreaded flickering.

Experimenting at Scale at Booking.com

By 2016, Chris had moved to Booking.com, a company famed for embedding experimentation into every layer of its operations. It was a game-changer for him. “I thought Iknew a lot about A/B testing, and I did… but I also realised how little I knew about Product Experimentation,” he admits, “It’s a totally different world, and it totally humbled me.”

At the time, the internal experimentation teams at Booking.com and other forward- thinking companies like Spotify or Microsoft were well ahead, both from the product, and the cultural point of view. At Booking.com, experimentation wasn’t an afterthought or a luxury; it was embedded in the DNA of how decisions were made. No feature, no update, no change—however small—was pushed live without rigorous A/B testing. The process was thorough, and the expectations were clear: if you wanted to make a change, you needed the data to back it up.

What really struck Chris was how democratised experimentation was at Booking.com. Experimentation wasn’t confined to a few specialists. Anyone, from designers to engineers, could propose and run experiments. Booking.com does not have, nor need, a WYSIWYG editor, as all experiments are server side and all teams have the resources they need to be autonomous in building and running experiments. They are empowered to make decisions—in fact, it’s what made experimentation so successful, was the organisational structure and the culture of experimentation. 

With experimentation supporting the decision making process throughout the organisation, this means that thousands of experiments are running at any given time, ensuring a high quality and reliable experimentation process at scale was one of Chris’ main focus areas in his years at booking. Besides training and education, switching from Fixed Horizon to Group Sequential Testing was the biggest driver to increasing the quality of experiments as it helped reduce the risk of peeking and jumping to premature conclusions, a common pitfall in traditional A/B testing.

Chris’ other priorities were to scale experimentation to new strategic areas including partner platforms, flight, and rental car booking, from the technical, but more importantly, from the process point of view. In such a complex business environment, decisions are not made in isolation and understanding how each experiment contributes to the overall business objectives and can impact another part of the business is key to making good informed product and business decisions. This was key in helping Booking.com maintain its edge in the competitive travel industry.

Joining ABsmartly

After years of pushing boundaries at Booking.com, Chris was ready for a new challenge. When Jonas Alves, the mastermind behind Booking.com’s experimentation platform, approached him to join ABsmartly, the timing felt right. Jonas had a vision to build a vendor platform which would match the capabilities of such an in-house platform like Booking.com and make product experimentation accessible to any product team around the world.

For Chris, moving to ABsmartly was an easy “yes.” He was drawn to ABsmartly’s mission to empower anyone in a company to experiment. Unlike traditional tools, which are often geared towards marketing use cases, ABsmartly’s product is built to serve the needs of developers and product managers alike. It offers features like real-time data processing and statistical safeguards designed to support experimentation throughout the entire product development lifecycle.

One of Chris’ goals at ABsmartly is to create a platform that works for everyone—technical or not. He wants to take the lessons learned from Booking.com’s internal systems and make them adaptable for organisations of varying sizes and complexities. This isn’t just about technology—it’s about fostering a culture of experimentation that encourages collaboration and breaks down silos.

How Experimentation Should Be Done

Christophe Perrin’s approach to experimentation is built on three core principles: curiosity, evidence, and continuous learning.

Asking Questions
For Chris, experimentation is all about curiosity. It’s about having the courage to ask, “What if we tried something different?” It’s not about playing it safe. It’s about cultivating a curious mindset by encouraging people and teams to ask questions and challenge assumptions. Not every experiment will succeed, but every experiment should be an opportunity to learn something valuable about our users.

Data-Lead Decisions
By basing product and business decisions on data, not opinions and focusing on measurable outcomes, experimentation strips away bias and helps teams prioritise. This, in turn, leads to more reliable and impactful outcomes for the business and the customers. 

Iteration as a Superpower
Experimentation is an ongoing process of discovery, iteration, and refinement. Every experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, adds to a team’s understanding of their users and their product. This iterative approach also keeps teams aligned with user needs. It’s not about what you think is best. It’s about listening to what your users tell you through their behaviour.

Shaping the Future at ABsmartly

With Chris as Head of Product at ABsmartly, the company is becoming much more than an experimentation platform—it’s a partner for organisations looking to innovate and grow. ABsmartly’s product roadmap is ambitious. We aim to support our users throughout the entire product development life cycle, from ideation and discovery to delivery, so they make the best possible informed decisions for their customers and their business. But it’s more than just building tools. Chris is passionate about fostering a culture of curiosity and data-driven decision-making. At ABsmartly, he’s working to help companies see experimentation not as an optional extra but as a core part of how they operate.

Under Chris’ guidance, ABsmartly is set to change the way organisations think about experimentation—making it accessible, impactful, and central to creating exceptional products.